A taste of home, a journal of metaphor and muse, flavored with wit and watercolor

"When dawn spreads its paintbrush on the plain, spilling purple... ," Songs of the Pioneers song from TV show "Wagon Train." Dawn on the mythic Santa Fe Trail, New Mexico, looking toward Raton from Cimarron. -- Clarkphoto. A curmudgeon's old-fashioned newspaper column, cross-breeding metaphors and journalism and art, for readers in 150 countries.

Coffee Grounds

Thursday, August 13, 2009

Booth is a verb, a love story...Interlude

The Illidge, a sojourner from Kansas in a strange land (Oklahoma), over the years usually departed his temporary abode when weekly classes closed, and as was his wont, winded his way to Wichita, where awaited “his little sweet pea.”

Dorothy may not have been there any more, but, lo, there were lots of Illidges--wife, children, grandchildren and great-granchildren. Here it was in the family manse, a two-story castle with broad front porch and porch swing on a brick street under massive elm trees, that the Elisabeth waited for him, “pining away,” as Illidge would proclaim. There the Illidges found recourse and sustenance from the world amid family and friends and faith through the years. As the weekend neared its nadir, after Mass and family dinner, the illuminated Illidge would align his comfortable carriage south along the way-35 for about three hours till he reached his “very own apartment” in the Republican rendezvous known as Edmond.

Thus it was that refreshed from R&R, the Illidge prepared for students, life, and more cribbage at the booth. How he came to sojourn in Oklahoma is a tail longer than a cat’s, and full of danger, drama, and injustice, as well as fortitude and fortune for those who would study under him. But that is yet another yarn to be told perchance later. Though what the Illidge experienced therein would lead him to expound forth, in the booth, on the “vagaries and vicissitudes” of life. And thus he did often, as the word of the Booth blossomed in the coming weeks. Few noticed at first, but the Booth, at some point over the weeks, became capitalized in their language. The first linguistic leap happened quickly...

Silence

Meditation

Just out the window,
black silhouettes of trees
remind me of those
halcyon days with you,
when we climbed out of the
cellar toward enlightenment.
Now, at a glance, the wild
birds swing into view,
obscuring the real world
of young men dying
to get home, and the
snow that falls on
our brains stays solid - never
melting into springtime.
On the ferry, we sit and
compare notes as to whom
in life has suffered the most;
men, women, boys, or girls?
Suddenly, in a revelation, you
say it is the Buddha over on
Main, who sits on his plywood
altar, surrounded by plastic
flowers, subjected to all the
passersby, who have never had
a Zen thought of their own…
--K. Lawson Gilbert